Administrative Science Quarterly

This paper reports on a qualitative field study of 16 hospitals implementing an innovative technology for cardiac surgery. We examine how new routines are developed in organizations in which existing routines are reinforced by the technological and organizational context All hospitals studied had top-tier cardiac surgery departments with excellent reputations and patient outcomes yet exhibited striking differences in the extent to which they were able to implement a new technology that required substantial changes in the operating-room-team work routine. Successful implementers underwent a qualitatively different team learning process than those who were unsuccessful. Analysis of qualitative data suggests that implementation involved four process steps: enrollment, preparation, trials, and reflection. Successful implementers used enrollment to motivate the team, designed preparatory practice sessions and early trials to create psychological safety and encourage new behaviors, and promoted shared meaning and process improvement through reflective practices. By illuminating the collective learning process among those directly responsible for technology implementation, we contribute to organizational research on routines and technology adoption.

I examine how different distributions of ownership and governance rights in firms affect the optimal organization of cross-functional project teams for knowledge-intensive work. I analyze multi-method data from two competing automated manufacturing equipment engineering firms with contrasting formal power structures, one a worker cooperative with ownership and governance rights distributed across occupations and the other a conventional firm with ownership and governance rights concentrated in the hands of several senior workers in one occupational group. Contrary to prior research, my findings suggest that when collective tasks are uncertain and complex, the benefits of cross-functional interactions depend on organizations’ formal power structure: cross-functional interactions improve teams’ productivity in the context of concentrated ownership and governance rights but not when ownership and governance rights are widely distributed among workers. Fieldwork at the two firms revealed three mechanisms by which dispersed formal power decreases the productivity benefits of cross-functional interaction: it reduces status distinctions among team members, increasing the labor hours required to resolve conflicts; boosts participation in oversight and coordination processes outside teams so that workers have more access to information and less need for cross-functional interactions; and increases the distribution of knowledge-management technology, which increases workers’ autonomy and reduces the value of cross-functional interactions.

This paper uses data on radio format changes to test hypotheses on innovations as catalysts for nonmimetic change in organizations. Innovations are difficult to interpret using existing schemata, causing organizations to search for information on the opportunities and threats implicit in observed innovations. Such search may lead to mimetic adoption of the innovation or, more likely, to more varied nonmimetic change. Results show an effect of innovations on the rate of nonmimetic change in radio markets, with innovations in large or nearby markets having greater effect and innovations by large organizations having less effect. The social and competitive relations of the innovator to a given organization are thus modifiers of the catalytic effect. These findings have implications for theories of innovation, competition, and organizational isomorphism.